Tussling titans, virtual twins

David Armstrong, EXAMINER MEDIA CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Monday, January 29, 1996

"THE BATTLE OVER CITIZEN KANE" is a rich and rewarding - if somewhat overripe - new documentary. Airing on PBS's

"The American Experience" (10 p.m. Monday, Channel 9), the film presents its steely, driven protagonists, renaissance man Orson Welles and media magnate William Randolph Hearst, as virtual twins, embodiments of American ambition, genius and appetite locked on a collision course.

The film's premiere - it also screened last week at the Sundance Film Festival - coincides with publication of the first volume of a Welles biography by the British actor and director Simon Callow. Attention is once again on "Citizen Kane," Welles' astonishing 1941 film debut. Based on the life of Hearst, it is the consensus choice of critics and scholars as the greatest American movie ever made.

"Kane," a corrosive portrait of the fictional press lord and fallen idealist Charles Foster Kane, pitted 26-year-old Welles, mercurial wunderkind of New York theater and radio, against a still-powerful 78-year-old Hearst, one of the most enduringly important figures in American journalism (and one-time proprietor of this newspaper).

"Battle" is a treasure of archival images and contemporary interviews, including film director and Welles admirer Peter Bogdanovich, journalist Jimmy Breslin and now-elderly actors who worked with Welles.

The 2-hour documentary includes footage of Welles' all-black WPA stage production of "Macbeth," his Broadway "Julius Caesar" (which anticipated Ian McKellen's film "Richard III" by setting Shakespeare in a modern fascist state) and, of course, his terrifying radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds," which had America convinced that Martians with a bad attitude had landed in New Jersey.

A woman who was a little girl when "Worlds" aired on CBS radio in 1938 remembers her mother frantically searching for more "news" of the alien invasion. Taken aback that other networks were carrying their regularly scheduled programming, Mother tsk-tsked "They're not as sharp as

CBS."

This film, by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein, also showcases marvelous images of a bygone Bay Area: the big, slow ferries plying the Bay, the small, quick buggies darting down Market Street. In the newsroom of the 1890s San Francisco Examiner - which co-writer and narrator Richard Ben Cramer calls "a ferocious little paper" - white men in white shirts and dark vests are glimpsed amid clouds of smoke from pipes and cigars.

Hearst's flair for dramatic muckraking is vividly recalled, as when an Examiner reporter tested the readiness of ferry crews by "falling" overboard in the choppy Bay, to see how long it would take for someone to jump in and fish him out. (Real long.) The aggressive Examiner staff dubbed itself The Wrecking Crew.

By the time Hearst, confidant of the movie stars and studio czars who flocked to his sumptuous parties at San Simeon, and Welles, new to Hollywood and anxious to make his mark, clash head-on, "Battle" is half-over. But it doesn't matter. The narrative is smartly paced and studded with nuggets of information: Welles' co-writer on "Kane," Herman Mankiewicz, had been Hearst's guest at San Simeon.

Hearst was furious about "Kane," especially the character based on his longtime companion, actress Marion Davies, whom "Kane" caricatured as a bimbo. Interviewees say the witty Davies had the potential to be a fine film comedian, and Welles - in a 1982 interview - concedes "It still strikes me as being something of a dirty trick, what we did to her."

The fact that Hearst went on the offensive against

"Kane" is well-known. Indeed, points made here were laid out 35 years ago in W.A. Swanberg's compelling biography "Citizen Hearst," a book that goes uncredited in "Battle."

According to Swanberg - and now, Lennon and Epstein - Hearst leaned on studio heads not to book "Kane" in their moviehouse chains, hinting that otherwise their dirty laundry might be aired in public. Louis B. Mayer offered to buy the film's negative and burn it. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons attacked Welles' patriotism. Hearst newspapers carried no ads for or reviews of

"Citizen Kane."

Although it was a critics' favorite and snared nine 1942 Academy Award nominations, "Kane" won only one Oscar (for the script). RKO Pictures then pulled the film from circulation, as studios do today with "problem" movies.

This is standard history, accepted by most students of the period. But "Battle" flares into hyperbole when Cramer and Lennon declare that the clash between Welles and Hearst was "The fight that ruined them both."

That's debatable, to say the least. Hearst was by then near the end of his long life (he died in 1951 at 88), his business battered by the Depression and largely in the hands of the banks. He had bigger things to think about than Welles' movie. His innovations in mass-market populist journalism, introduced decades before, were well-established.

Welles (who died in 1985) had a much harder time raising money for his projects after the "Kane" controversy, but his creative star burned for years. Although Welles lost final edit on his second movie, "The Magnificent Ambersons," it is arguably "Kane's" equal. His noirish "Touch of Evil" has dazzled generations of directors, his Falstaff in "Chimes at Midnight" is celebrated, and his "Otello" and rediscovered "It's All True" are influential works.

Its debatable points aside, "Battle" effectively evokes two giants of popular culture. And it's a pleasure to luxuriate again in the deep-focus expressionist black and white excerpts from "Citizen Kane" itself.&lt;